In 2010 the world’s 2nd largest web retailer (b2c) – the Hamburg-based Otto Group – decided to refactor large parts of its existing multi-tenancy middleware and backend landscape from a classical 3-tier layout towards a service oriented architecture. The aim of this project is to support the upcoming challenges imposed by the global growth strategy which includes the promising BRIC nations. The latter will cause a significant increase of traffic driven to the 50+ web shops operated by the Otto Group companies. Additionally the new platform will support the companies in utilizing the large amount of data (traffic, user tracking, orders …) being collected during runtime much better than today. The talk will get you into the existing Spring 2.x-based setup, describe the aspects that led to the refactoring project and present the approach followed to identify and prioritize requirements. You will get an understanding on how the project operated in a very unique context of various companies having different requirements with respect to their business goals. Finally you will be presented the high-level architecture and how it is supposed to support the future ecommerce strategy of the Otto Group using technologies like JEE 6, Glassfish v3.x, ESB, messaging, CRM/ERP integration and caches. For more company information please visit: goo.gl/9YICz and goo.gl/6vfuF

Christian Kreutzfeldt works as an ecommerce platform architect at the Otto Group in beautiful Hamburg / Germany. He participated in the definition of the presented architecture from the beginning and is interested large scale architectures especially when it comes to his beloved topic: ecommerce.